Our Abruzzo property now boasts rooftiles and render. But the decorative touch of time-honoured traditional Abruzzo brickwork, needs time – and two Abruzzo craftsmen !

So here we are, a couple of weeks before Christmas, with the roof of our new Abruzzo property half-tiled and the outside walls half-rendered; a chimney; the first fix of plumbing finished; and the first electrics fix about to start.

By the time the crew break for the holidays, the target is that all the tiling and rendering will be finished and our house will be painted. Plus one or two little extras.

When the old ruins that stood on our site were demolished at the end of May, we kept as many as we could of the massive old roof beams. Now the time has come to haul them out of the distant part of the garden where they've been lying for seven months and recycle them.

They're made of chestnut and some are absolutely huge – 3m long and 50cms thick. Now they have to be carefully selected, cleaned, cut to length and used – as they were before – in the ceilings of our house and your Abruzzo holiday villas. We think we have just about enough.

Then there's the decorative brickwork at roof level. Take a look at any older Abruzzo property and you'll see this distinctive pattern. It's a style unique to this particular region.

This traditional Abruzzo brickwork was a feature on the two old houses we demolished and we liked it so much that we wanted it on our own house and the holiday villas too.

Trouble is, that to lay traditional Abruzzo brickwork around your Abruzzo holiday villa, (not to mention our brand-new Abruzzo home), you need experienced Abruzzo craftsmen – and time. This isn't a job to be rushed. It's meticulous and painstaking.

The two signori of a certain age, who arrived each day in an equally time-defying van, worked at their own pace, puffing contentedly on their pipes, in a different time-frame to Gianni and Vito and Antonio and the other ragazzi. For two weeks, work went on in a blur around them. Then they'd finished and two our Abruzzo craftsmen puttered away in their van for a final time. Their contribution is a now-permanent echo of the past and of old skills. E' bello cosi'- non e' vero ? 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 4:05 am and is filed under About Abruzzo, Daily Life, Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.